WORKS

2017 – In the Earth Time. Italian Guest Pavilion, Gyeonggi Ceramic Biennale, Yeoju Dojasesang Korea, organized and coordinated by MIC Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza

2017 – Chronos, L'arte contemporanea e il suo tempo, curated by Angela Madesani, Palazzo Botti - Torre Pallavicina (BG)

2016 – From Liberty to Freedom, PH Neutro, Pietrasanta

2016 – XXIV Biennale Internationale Contemporaine, Musée Magnelli, Vallauris

2016 – La Sfida di Aracne, Riflessioni sul femminile dagli anni '70 ad oggi, curated by Angela Madesani, Nuova Galleria Morone, Milan

2016 – Arte Fiera Bologna

2015 – Imago Mundi, Praestigium Italia di Luciano Benetton, Fondazione Re Rebaudendo Torino – Fondazione Cini Venezia.

2015 – GNAM Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, curated by N. Caruso and Mariastella Margozzi

2014 – 2015 Collect London, Saatchi Gallery, London, curated by Officine Saffi Milano

2014 – ECC 2014 Danish Prize Ceramic Art, Kontakt Bornholms Kunstmuseum

2014 – Arte Fiera, Bologna

2011 – 54° Biennale di Venezia, Palazzo della Meridiana, Genoa

celeste
experimental photoceramic on stoneweare

When, in 1975, Carolee Schneemann presented a performance titled “Interior Scroll” to an audience of solely women, from her vagina she did not just extract blood. The violent and symbolic performance gave birth, together with the red liquid, to a roll of paper which spoke of the femicide, in the sense of exclusion, of women in art history. Apart from the content, the gesture itself expressed an authentic interior denudation. Celeste’s uterus speaks just the language of blood and emptiness. And so, of silence, in the sense of nothing. In a complex installation that, considering the compositional phases, constitutes a performance concept in which the artist places not just her body, but also the effort of repetitive action, under the spotlight, Silvia Celeste Calcagno constructs another component in her reflection on the slender thread separating life and death. Emptiness is the dominant element, placed in the foreground by means of a photographic viewpoint that relegates the subject to a greater distance. Just as happens in Martin Creed’s video “Sick Film,” 2007, in which a series of boys and girls enter the video frame from one side, and vomit, leaving most of the field, dominated by white, entirely empty, Celeste’s body becomes an element of secondary importance with respect to emptiness. The shots acquire a crude appearance during the transfer to clay and the high-temperature firings, corroding a linearity that nonetheless survives with a degree of purity; they are softened by the soft movement of her hair. Like a new Eve, Celeste covers her nudity with her hands that cannot halt the weeping of her uterus. The original sin of this modern primeval woman lies in the body: her limbs, cadenced by biological rhythms, vibrate with the violence of nature. Generating rage, to the point of crushing the flesh of her thighs in her fingers, her fingernails. The same rage becomes the leitmotif of the video that completes the installation, in which a woman, seen from behind, washes a glass with increasingly rapid and nervous movements, slamming it down onto the draining board.
The context is minimalist, and empty once again. The crudely-framed action, recalling a Nouvelle Vague film, is subjected to an acceleration orchestrated by a soundtrack in which the woman’s voice repeats a series of actions in an impersonal tone. Without a new Adam, Eve Celeste is devoured by an emptiness, which, differently to her previous works, from “My July” to “Thursday,” does not corrode just her existential ego, the ego enwrapped in an ontological fragility, but flesh itself. The blood is not cathartic, as it was in the sacrificial acts of Greek Tragedies: it is guilt. Guilt that generates rage. Leaving all that remains of Celeste so happy, so alone.
But emptiness devoured the new Eve by Silvia Campese